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Friday, April 28, 2017

`233 Fully Drawn Characters'

My
youngest son and I were talking about country music and why some of it is so
good and some so dreadful. We share a liking for Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings,
Willie Nelson, George Jones and Johnny Cash, among others. I told him that
Charlie Parker, according to Nat Hentoff, defended country music when other jazz
musicians were making fun of it. We tried to define why the songs can be so
memorable, and David came up with a likely explanation. Apart from the music
itself, he said, “The songs tell stories about people.” To cite obvious
examples, consider Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” written by
Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman; Haggard’s “If I Could Only Fly,” by Blaze
Foley; and Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” covered by Haggard and Nelson.

Our
talk reminded me of a poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, who brings to life more
characters and tell more stories than some novelists. I remembered reading a
tally, and after a brief search I found this in Chard Powers Smith’s Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin
Arlington Robinson (1965):

“It
is in the other category of greatness, that of size of population, that
Robinson is preeminent among poets in English except those who wrote for the
stage. His 233 fully drawn characters are approached only by Chaucer’s 188—the latter
at a cursory count.”

Here
are two of Robinson’s poems that amount to novellas in verse: “Aunt Imogen” (Captain Craig, 1902) and “Bewick Finzer”
(The Man Against the Sky, 1916). The
concluding lines of the latter encapsulate a life and might be sung by Haggard:
“Familiar as an old mistake, / And futile as regret.”